seeds

As more and more plant varieties have become privatized through patents, and as large corporations have bought up smaller seed breeders, a dangerous consolidation has occurred. The genetic diversity of agricultural crops has shrunk, making crops more vulnerable to disease and our food supply more insecure. Meanwhile, farmers and the public have become more dependent on a few large agrochemical companies.

In short, seed patents have become a tool for privatizing seed from the pool of open and commonly owned plant genetic resources: an insidious enclosure of seed commons.

This scenario is eerily similar to the consolidation of software for personal computers some twenty years ago. Microsoft used its market dominance to incorporate all sorts of software programs into its Windows operating system, a strategy sometimes referred to as “embrace, extend and extinguish.” As Microsoft exploited its de facto monopoly over common software systems, programs for word-processing, spreadsheets and other functions began to go out of business.

From OpenSourceSeeds website

But just as open source software served as a powerful antidote to proprietary software, so a group of academics, activists and plant breeders in Germany has now pioneered a similar antidote to seed patents: an open source license.

The Open Source Seed license, recently released by a group called OpenSourceSeeds, is trying to “make seeds a common good again.” The license amounts to a form of “copyleft” for new plant varieties, enabling anyone to use the licensed seeds for free. Like the General Public License for free software, the seed license has one serious requirement: any seeds that are used, modified or sold must be passed along to others without any legal restrictions.

Not so long ago, the language of “intellectual property” (IP) was the only serious way of talking about creative works and inventions. Copyright and patents provided the default framework for explaining how someone’s bright idea grew into a marketable product, and how that in turn contributed to economic growth and human progress. It was a neat, tidy, reassuring story. It had an irresistible simplicity – and the endorsement of the ultimate authority, government.

And then…. the pluriversal realities of life came storming the citadel gates! Over the past fifteen or twenty years, the monoculture narrative of IP has been attacked by indigenous cultures, seed activists, healthcare experts, advocates for the poor, the academy, and especially users of digital technologies. It has become increasingly clear that the standard IP story, whatever its merits on a smaller scale, in competitive industries, is mostly a self-serving, protectionist weapon in the hands of Hollywood, record labels, book publishers, Big Pharma and other multinational IP industries.

We can thank the authors of a new anthology for helping to explain how the standard IP narrative is profoundly flawed, and how an array of challengers are showing how knowledge-creation so often emerges through social commons.

The past thirty years have seen a massive patent grab to control agricultural seeds and the crops that are grown, not just in the US but around the world. In the name of progress and greater yields, seed companies introduced proprietary GMO and hybrid seeds, slowly squeezing out seeds that are more common and shareable. This is exactly what Microsoft did in software, using Windows to marginalize competing software systems, and this is what bottling companies have done to water, trying to supplant tap water with heavily marketed branded water.

Some folks at the University of Wisconsin have launched a new effort to fight this trend in the seed market through what they call the Open Source Seed Initiative. The project last week released 29 new varieties of broccoli, celery, kale, quinoa and other vegetables and grains, all of them licensed under the equivalent of software’s General Public License (GPL), which is what has allowed GNU/Linux to remain in the commons. Matt Watson, via Flicker, under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives 2.0 license.

The license, known as the Open Source Seed Pledge, lets anyone use the open source seeds for whatever purpose they want – provided that any subsequent seeds produced are also made available on the same basis. The idea is to bypass the built-in bias of proprietary control in the patent system, and assure that the new seeds will be available for anyone to grow, breed and share in perpetuity, without the fear of someone imposing intellectual property restrictions on later uses of the seeds.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison news office quoted horticulture professor and plant breeder Irwin Goldman, one of the authors of the pledge, as saying: “These vegetables are part of our common cultural heritage, and our goal is to make sure these seeds remain in the public domain for people to use in the future.” Last week Goldman released two carrot varieties he developed, named Sovereign and Oranje, at a public ceremony outside of the university’s microbial sciences building.

In a sign of how far the forces of enclosure have come, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that re-using seeds that are patented, knowingly or not, amounts to an act of piracy. Of course, re-using seeds has been the tradition in agriculture for millennia, just as re-using songs and text is an essential element of culture.

No matter. The masters of "intellectual property" hold the whip hand, and they don't want us to re-use and share seeds as the natural course of things. If you think that a farmer ought to be able to use the seeds from one crop in the next season, you are entertaining illegal ideas. (Just be happy that Google doesn't have access to your mind yet -- although Google Glass may be a leading gambit!)

US Department of Agriculture

The Supreme Court case involved 75-year-old farmer Hugh Bowman, who bought bean seeds from a grain elevator and planted them in his fields. Since nearly all soybeans are now genetically engineered to be pesticide resistant, Bowman suspected, correctly, that the beans he bought might also be Roundup-resistant like the earlier generation of seeds. It turns out they were – and so Bowman grew them several seasons, using the next generation of seeds each time. But here’s the catch – the original generation of seeds are patented, and he didn’t pay Monsanto for the right to use the second-generation of seeds for planting.

This amounts to an act of intellectual property theft, according to the Court, because farmers should not presume to have the right to re-plant seeds from prior harvests. Companies like Monsanto now hold property rights in seeds, and they don’t like the competition from the commons. The commons is the radical idea that the abundance of nature (self-reproducing plants) ought to be shareable.

Two cases involving the patenting of living organisms are now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the outcomes do not look good. It appears that commoners who wish to use seeds, genes and other living things as a shared gift of nature will be cast out into the darkness once again. The Court seems poised to privilege the private control of lifeforms, providing yet another legal subsidy for the market order.

The seed case was brought by a 75-year-old farmer from Indiana who had bought commodity soybeans from a grain elevator. As described by the New York Times, an estimated 90 percent of all U.S. soybean crops are now grown from genetically modified Monsanto seeds resistant to the Roundup herbicide. Not surprisingly, many of the seeds that farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman bought contained second-generation versions of Monsanto seeds.

The problem is, Bowman inadvertently grew a new batch of GMO seeds without paying Monsanto or getting its authorization. Monsanto sued him, claiming that Bowman’s crops infringed Monsanto’s patent. Accepting the view that Monsanto’s patent let it control even second-generation seeds, a U.S. federal district court forced Bowman to pay an $84,000 fine.

In his legal filings, Bowman argues that once a patented object is sold, the seller loses control over how it can be used. This is a legal doctrine known as “patent exhaustion.” It’s similar in concept to the “first sale doctrine” in copyright law, which prohibits publishers and other copyright holders from charging licenses for library books or DVDs. If the scope of copyright or patent rights is too extensive, sellers can control too many “downstream” uses of the product, usually with harmful effects on competition, innovation and price. (Come to think of it, though, that is precisely what is also happening with e-books and e-journals: publishers are licensing content rather than selling it, giving them much greater control over downstream markets.)

The Pavlovsk Experimental Station near St. Petersburg, Russia, is considered a priceless repository of agricultural biodiversity. An estimated 90 percent of its seed varieties are not found anywhere else on the planet — more than 5,000 rare varieties of fruits and berries from dozens of countries. The seeds are irreplaceable jewels of genetic history that could be vital in developing new plant varieties as climate change threatens existing varieties of plants.

A focus on peer-organised initiatives for relocalised agriculture, platform co-operatives, cosmo-local production, urban commons, community wealth building, and sustainable care work, among other approaches. Participants will leave with a keener sense of specific models for actualising social and economic change; a vocabulary and concepts that open up new vistas of possibility; and a mental map of the leading people, projects, websites, and movements developing new institutional forms. More information at Stir to Action.